I remain frustrated by the complete lack of marketing and business sense that many open source companies continue to display. I thought that we were past the whole foolishness of competing in the ghetto amongst ourselves vs. the big proprietary guys with lots of dough but it seems that the argument has just started taking other forms.

A group of developers from free software digital video recorder (DVR) related projects announced the first step towards a solution for obtaining free television listing information this week. The search for such a free guide data source has been on since June, when Zap2it Labs announced it would shut down its free, XML-based service as of September 1.

Amazon uses Linux. eBay uses Windows. But what OSs and webservers run Web 2.0? We tested 17 of our favorites and found out. The script is included below to check for yourself.

In a classroom setting, Linux presents a lot of advantages for me as a teacher. I can easily use and experiment with cool new software and expose my students to a variety of platforms in a controlled environment. As Marc points out, doing this at an enterprise level is a much different story.

[...] a few wireless network chip manufacturers have claimed that they cannot release their hardware documentation or firmware interface documentation to open source driver developers because FCC regulations forbid it. That excuse is no longer valid.

The fact is that, in a production environment, Linux is NOT a free solution. There are costs associated with every solution and the relative cost of any solution is dependent upon many factors. In the end, no solution will serve all needs, nor will any solution, by itself, prove to be dramatically more cost-effective than another.